Blog Etiquette

I’m fairly new to blogging but have tried to make myself aware of and follow blog etiquette.

Cafe Mama seems to lay it out best. She touches on giving attribution to other’s blogs when you get an idea from them by linking back to them. She also talks about referring to other bloggers you enjoy and the art of leaving comments and how to do it right. It’s all so simple and you’d think common sense, but unfortunately it’s not for some.

I’d say it’s pretty uncool to harmlessly take an idea from someone’s blog without giving proper credit for it but it’s even more so uncool to realise it’s been noticed and then obviously change the date on the less creative post to make it appear as if it was written before the post it stemmed from.

It seems blogging in general is about sharing and community. We all seem to share ideas for blog posts. This really isn’t a big deal at all but really, just mention where your idea sparked from. Be kind and link to the original bloggers site.

Thanks Katherine. It actually was done but I’m not hurt about it since it’s wasn’t an idea that I put a lot of thought into or anything. I was surprised at first but thought *shrug* meh, whatever. It wasn’t until after I made a good spirited comment about my similar posting and the dates being changed that I was finally put off. I thought, what a odd thing to do over something so trivial. Makes me wonder about the other “creative” ideas I see on the blog.

That’s really it, when its so purposeful it feels like theft. When someone takes your intellectual property, even if you would have hardly cared about giving it away, when its taken from you it makes you an odd kind of invisible. Now that is a low thing to do to another person. That is a real theft.

I didn’t do anything about it. Except stop linking to that person. What can you do? You can confront. But what’s done is done. This person reworked her entire blog based the theme I had been writing about all year. Then she said she was planning a book. Then she suggested I “switch blog hosts.” If she’d said just one time, “Hey I’m changing everything on my blog because I’m so moved by these ideas I read here and here…” I would have been fine. It was just her selfishness and the way she was willfully burying me that made me feel bad. Eww.

Anyhow – who can prove it isn’t all a coincidence? I can’t. I just feel in my heart it was wrong. She obviously isn’t as creative or smart as she seems on her blog. And I’m done with her. This whole blogging thing is as much a project for me to learn about the internet as anything else. So, I took the whole thing as a learning opportunity. And a reminder that anything published can easily be taken. So if I ever did want to write a book, I should not blog about it. The chances that I will write a book? HA! About as likely as a Canadian snow ball landing in my new pond. But its good to take the lessons as they come, right?